The present invention can improve the voice quality of a speech signal received or heard by a person listening on a phone in an environment with noise. Particularly in the case where a listener is using a wireless phone, a listener may have difficulty listening to speech signals the listener receives because the listener is in an environment with noise, such a city environment where there is a lot of street noise. A natural response for a listener being in an environment with noise is to raise his or her voice in level and pitch. This response has been called the Lombard Effect. An existing approach to solving this problem of listening on a phone in an environment with noise is that the listener raises the volume of the ear piece of the phone. Existing approaches to solving the problem require the listener make adjustments to his or her speech and manual adjustments to the phone in order to help make the speech signal received by the listener dominate over the noise in the listener's environment or help make the listener feel as though he or she is returning a coherent speech signal amidst the environment with noise. An improvement to existing approaches does not require the listener to make such adjustments.
The present invention borrows the ideas of the Lombard Effect and a listener raising the volume of the ear piece to improve the voice quality of a speech signal received by a listener on a phone in an environment with noise. Accordingly, the present invention determines when the listener is in an environment with noise and based on the level of noise in the listener's environment, processes the speech signal received by the listener. As a result of this processing, the speech signal received by the listener can dominate over the noise in the listener's environment. Thus, the goal of the present invention is to make the speech signal received by a listener easier to hear and understand.